Comprehensive essential gene identification as a platform for novel anti-infective drug discovery

In large part, antimicrobial drug discovery is driven by the breadth and quality of both potential drug targets and available chemical libraries to screen. Traditionally, targets have been few in number and have been limited to those with known function, from which biochemical assays could be implemented into drug screens. Iterations of this same basic approach, applied to a few biochemically-defined targets have identified a limited set of novel antibiotics and even fewer antifungal agents. Indeed, in the last 50 years less than 30 antimicrobial targets have been exploited commercially. Within infectious disease, the industry was driven largely by chemistry-based approaches, simply making new analogs to existing drugs to overcome the growing problem of drug resistance. Elitra Pharmaceutical's approach has been to enable true functional genomics on a genome-wide scale. Elitra's vision has been to identify all of the essential genes directly in the key pathogenic organisms. Having moved rapidly towards the completion of this goal, we are now faced with the enviable challenge of prioritizing enormous target sets and developing novel sensitive screens for those best suited as definitive drug targets. These highly sensitive, cell-based screening paradigms enable re-screening of even well screened chemical libraries to reveal new chemical entities displaying novel modes of action against new targets. In parallel, we have also begun to shift the paradigm from screening targets singly, towards genome-wide approaches to drug screening.